Superficial Intelligence

This day, exactly one year ago, my wife and I arrived at Minnesota. Our lives as residents of this cold state and as graduates students began. Today I look back at myself one year ago and boy have things changed. I have had many enriching experiences throughout my first year as a PhD student. And I would like to share some of them with you. So let's get right to it:

I learned how little I really know

I thought I learned a lot as an undergrad. After all, I worked on many class projects and even did a few internships with IBM. Surely I was ready to survive in the real world. And yes, I know that I could have survived. But oh how much I would have missed.

I have learned so much in this past year that I feel like going straight to the workplace would have left me doing something I didn't really like. The first reason is because I actually discovered that there was another area in computers that I was more passionate about (but I'll talk more about that in another post). My research and classes have also taught me a lot: how to design usable interfaces, what HCI is all about, how to work with lots of data (data mining), a few extra programming languages (Javascript, Adobe Flex, LISP - yuck, python, etc.), and more.

While working on Cyclopath, I have also come to realize how inefficient my programming skills really are. I have always thought of myself as a good programmer, capable of adapting to many programming languages and solving complex problems. But I have realized that my coding style really needs a lot of work. I have an excellent project leader who gives me a lot of feedback after every piece of code I submit. The first time, it took me a while to swallow. But now I see it as opportunities to perfect my programming skills.

One of my goals after finsihing my PhD is to start my own project or even company. For that, I believe that efficient coding skills and solid knowledge of computer science is essential. That is why I know this PhD is not a waste of time. This first year alone has taught me how little I really know and how much is left.